Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure is related to techniques and apparatus for removable vehicle seats. More particularly, embodiments may enable easy alignment of separate seat rails and sliders along a particular direction or axis of movement.
Description of the Related Art
Vehicle seat location adjustment, whether for bench seats or bucket-type seats, is typically a fore/aft adjustment along the longitudinal vehicle direction to accommodate drivers and passengers of varying heights.
These adjustments can consist of a pair of parallel seat tracks underneath the seat upon which the entire seat assembly slides. These tracks are installed at the time of manufacture and no further seat removal or installation is anticipated for the life of the vehicle. Therefore, no provisions are made for such procedures.
Multi-passenger vehicles such as vans, minivans and SUVs, vehicle manufacturers may have seating arrangements that are also reconfigurable in a multitude of ways. The arrangements evolved from basic, fixed location seats for rows behind that of the driver's seat, to those with folding and removable seats.
These features enable flexible seating configurations, such as the removal or repositioning of the back and/or middle row(s) of seats to increase cargo capacity in vehicles with multiple rows of seats. Further, this allow for the removal of particular seating positions in vehicles equipped with individual seats, whether by removal from the vehicle or folding to a different position, such as flat into the vehicle's floor, providing further flexible seating and hauling configurations to accommodate a wide variety of uses.
Removable seats that are also laterally adjustable were developed, as disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 6,609,745 (Miyahara, et al). These seats allow for reconfiguration of seating arrangements in additional ways.
While the disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 6,609,745 indicates the distance between the front and rear lateral slide rails are fixed for each row of seats, U.S. Pat. No. 6,609,745 does not disclose positioning and securing the front and rear seat rails for each seat assembly relative to one another in the lateral direction, transverse to a vehicle's longitudinal direction.
Seat removal, where a seat assembly is separated from the seat tracks completely, leaves the seat sliders independent of one another, not attached to a common or shared component such as the seat frame. This presents a unique problem when installing the seats.
Seat slider alignment does not tend to arise with adjustment in the longitudinal direction of the vehicle because mechanisms used in those designs are usually built into the seat and not separated from the seat during use or adjustment.
As such, the seat sliders in laterally adjustable seats require additional adjustment so that they are sufficiently aligned relative to one another in the lateral direction prior to installation of each seat assembly, even if the seat slider positions vary only slightly from one another in the lateral direction. Otherwise the installation process can become cumbersome, difficult, and potentially result in seats not correctly installed.